Sonic Infidelities: Performing Time, Space, and Nonalignment in Hương Ngô’s In the Shadow of the Future

Abstract

Critics have long pointed out that there was nothing “cold” about the Cold War—its wars extended as hot proxy wars impacting spaces outside of the Eastern and Western Blocs. Treating the Cold War as a metaphor, this article analyzes how interdisciplinary artist Hương Ngô mobilizes “sonic performances of infidelities,” a term I use to draw attention to how diasporic bodies reject the polarizing discourses of the Cold War in spatial, temporal, and epistemological terms. By noting how Ngô employs the visual, sonic, and performative, this article identifies how Ngô’s sonic performances of infidelity ultimately construct an alternative to the Cold War that pulls from her feminist refugee aesthetic repertoire; enunciates from the specificity of Vietnamese diasporic life; and is, moreover, in spirited dialogue with the long historical and internationalist ethos of nonalignment.